Details

This talk is on a project where Free Software meets Creative Commons meets the “Gamers’ Bill of Rights“. (Part of this includes the recommending of non-free software licences, which Manchester Free Software does not endorse.).

Dan’s talk description:

“Building computer games is fast becoming big business, not just for the big companies, but also for the little companies. Witness the success of smaller studios like Rovio of Angry Birds fame (30 people) and Minecraft (one single person), and you can see why there is no reason why we cannot create games in the open source world to sit alongside these successes. But we need tools for this: Ways of easily constructing the games, modern and effective distribution methods, ways of getting the users’ feedback and so on.”

“Enter Gluon, an open platform for creating and distributing games. This talk will shortly explain the ideas behind Gluon, and present the GamingFreedom.org network for makers and players of games. Finally a live demonstration of the Gluon Creator tool used to build games will show you just how easy it is to build games today, and why you can do it, without needing to know everything about game creation.”

The event will include a Q&A session, discussion and then lively debate in the pub afterwards.

Speaker

“Dan, known to most people as Leinir, is a software developer who started out by ruining his possibilities for the next few years by learning Visual Basic 3 as his first language. However, from there he jumped later to PHP, which he worked on as a part of a Multimedia Designer course, and finally decided to learn properly, starting at Aalborg University’s informatics course, which now, five years later, has resulted in an MSc in software construction, specialised in game and engine programming. His active involvement with the open source community began when he joined the Amarok team as usability guy in 2006, and finally in 2009 he joined the Gluon team. Here he helped refine the library layout, and was primus motor for developing the Gluon Vision, as well as being one of two core developers on the Gluon Engine system. In June 2010 he finishes his Master’s Thesis, and following this he has moved to England, where he now resides, working for the small consultancy company KO GmbH on the free office engine Calligra. He, of course, still works on Gluon in his spare time, devoting a great deal of energy to that.”